Low Cost Universal Remote Patient Monitoring System

This paper presents an intelligent remote patient monitoring system for chronic conditions, when very low cost and patient acceptance are key drivers. The system was successfully validated in the context of the chronic condition of type-1 diabetes where the patient´s own glucose meter is used with a newly developed device as the front end system and patient records are transferred through HTTP protocol to an intelligent back-end web server, utilizing the readily available infrastructure of the Internet. The front-end device incorporates a hardwired TCP/IP stack on a tiny 8bit 8051 MCU, and software tools to develop efficient interfacing for extracting patient records, a GUI on the client web browser, and enable secure transmission to a web server. The system is designed to support any serial port device, while at the same time offering multiplatform OS compatibility without requiring any additional software installation on the client computer.